Posted
by
kdawsonon Friday May 01, 2009 @10:44AM
from the restructuring-the-edge dept.

coondoggie writes in with a Network World piece that begins "A range of companies with wireless LANs are discovering that 50% to 90% or more of Ethernet ports now go unused, because Wi-Fi has become so prevalent. They look at racks of unused switches, ports, Ethernet wall jacks, the cabling that connects them all, the yearly maintenance charges for unused switches, electrical charges, and cooling costs. So why not formally drop what many end users have already discarded — the Ethernet cable? 'There's definitely a right-sizing going on,' says Michael King, research director, mobile and wireless, for Gartner. 'By 2011, 70% of all net new ports will be wireless. People are saying, "we don't need to be spending so much on a wired infrastructure if no one is using it."' ... There is debate over whether WLANs, including the high-throughput 802.11n networks, will be able to deliver enough bandwidth." Cisco, which makes both wireless and wired gear, has a spokesman quoted calling this idea of right-sizing a "shortsighted message from a wireless-only provider. It's penny-wise and pound-foolish."

Wireless is great for end users and other "last yard" applications, but I don't see WiFi ever overtaking wired networks for anything else. Cables will always be faster (I'm comparing *tomorrow's* cables, with *tomorrow's* wired networks, so sit down and put your trousers back on) than WiFi, and far more reliable due to greater resilience against interference and other environmental factors. It also has a smaller attack surface area, so for security sensitive applications, the additional physical constraints may be a benefit.

Yes, I think that office floors and other last-hop from switch to user applications could become completely wireless, but let's not get carried away. Anyone who says "we don't need wired ethernet any more" is short sighted and simply trying to attract attention. Wired ethernet will always have a place trunking the WiFi hotspots and carrying bulk data.

It is certainly possible(and easy) to implement wireless security wrong or not at all; but the notion that "wireless=fundamentally insecure" seems dubious at best.

After all, we generally trust encryption, in the form of SSL, VPNs, and the like to safely carry data across the public internet, a known cesspool of hostility and attackers. It isn't clear why it would be any less safe when dealing with the pool of possible attackers that exists within(assuming good antennas) a few kilometers of your site. Plus, since wireless is known to be vulnerable, people generally try to secure it. Unless your physical security is tight, I'll almost certainly have a much easier time sneaking in and plugging in than I will trying to break WPA or better. WEP absolutely blew, but the bad old days are (mostly) over.

If you want to break in at a "physical" level between two wireless connections you just have to be sitting in radio range. Which may, or may not, even be in the same building. To break into a wired connection at the same level you'll have to attach some vampire clamps or whatever somewhere which means a physical break, physical access to the network.

as for client side certs there is nothing preventing wired from having this, and in fact a lot of secure installations do. Just because Wireless has some fancy WPA stuff that most people should enable doesn't make it more secure, if anything it's a nice warm blanket for people to have.

A Hardened Wireless connection will always be less secure then a Hardened Wired connection. One sends signals throughout the air one through a small cable.

Assuming we're talking a modern encrypted network, #5 is going to be hard to work out. The handshake algorithm is no longer vulnerable to replay attacks, so I'm not sure what you plan on doing with your recorded authentication attempts.

Yeah, unless you combine the signal wire with a grounded pair. It would work even better if you twisted the pairs together. Hell you wouldn't even need shielding! Man, I could make a fortune with this unshielded, twisted pair idea...

Sure, if you know nothing about security. Why does everyone think wired is so secure? I would say well implemented wireless networks are more secure than the average wired network. This is because well implemented wireless networks have strong authentication (e.g. client side certificates) and encryption whereas most wired networks do not have these things.

And tell me how that stops me from jamming the wireless frequency bands. Security isn't just confidentiality, it's also protecting yourself from DoS.

You can implement strong authentication on wired connections as well. Really what you're saying is "Wireless is more secure because it's so insecure at physical layer that we had to implement proper network security"

Well there are other aspects. If you are not the IT guy, you may get one semi-legit answer when some real answer lies underneath.

For example;

Luser: "I want wireless" IT: "No, it's too insecure"

The REAL reason; "no, we do not have a proper policy about computers from home, and your dumb ass will doubtless bring in an infected laptop."

Or: "What, do I look like I have time to help you troubleshoot sitting on the crapper (in a metal box), nor do I want to listen to you bitch about how fast it is and explain simple high-school physics to your retarded ass for failing to understand why the microwave screws up your download."

Wired connections help IT police what goes on on the network. Wireless hurts that to a large degree. EVEN IF it's properly secured, I don't always want to finger-fuck whatever garbage the Lusers may want to try to connect with (looking at YOU iPhone).

So, if you got told "no for security reasons" and you are not in the IT department, they probably think you are too dumb to deal with a wireless card not to be a persistent pain in the ass.

Also, if you have any type of government audit, you have to deal with ignorant auditors that also have old beliefs about wireless networks. IT DOESNT MATTER what you may know about wireless if you deal with one of those bozos.

All of this stuff can quickly make wireless a net-negative for the IT folks around you and get the thing rejected "for security reasons".

Yup. Where I work, we deal with a considerable amount of very sensitive information. There are, of course, ways to deal with that via encryption, but then again, I've got a few miles of network cable, so why would I go that much trouble?

But if I'm on wireless, I can just turn my screen closer to me so those evil hackers can't see my credit card password! If I have a cable, I can't move! Therefore, wireless is far more secure.

bandwidth

What are you geeks talking about? I can get my emails and download the internets perfectly fine while I watch the teevee!

interference/reliability

Oh yeah? What about cats? If my cat chews through the cable, then I'm out for a week while I wait for the cable guy to come fix it! That doesn't sound very reliable to me! Cats can't chew through the wireless!

You've just made a serious breech of Slashdot protocol. You shouldn't post AC, when your comment would be modded funny..

Last time I checked, Funny gave no karma, and Overrated took away karma. So if moderators go into a Funny/Overrated mod war over a comment, the poster loses karma rapidly. Such mod wars have brought users from Excellent (posting at 2) down to Terrible (posting at -1) in one day.

On the wireless Internets, there are no tubes, so there are no tubes to get clogged.

The tube from the antenna to the AP that gets clogged more easily than the tubes on a wired switch. But residential Internet service is even easier to clog than the antenna tube.

As CIO at a radio astronomical observatory with instruments receiving in the 2.3GHz band, I can say that we prohibit WiFi here completely. We went as far as running shielded Cat5e and Cat6, and building the data center into a screened room to reduce the RFI. Ferrite beads on all cabling going into and out of the data center are installed as well.

In Antarctica [gdargaud.net] we can't use CAT cables because their dielectric properties change at extreme cold temperatures (-80C) and they run like crap. The cables also turn to raw spaghetti and break at the slightest touch.

So we use wireless (absolutely no interferences there !), or fiber, which doesn't change properties with the cold. Usually both as a backup in case a snowmachine runs in a cable (we can't put them in the 'ground' or they would disappear under the accumulated snow over a few years, so we place them on rows of low poles).

As CIO at a radio astronomical observatory with instruments receiving in the 2.3GHz band, I can say that we prohibit WiFi here completely. We went as far as running shielded Cat5e and Cat6, and building the data center into a screened room to reduce the RFI. Ferrite beads on all cabling going into and out of the data center are installed as well.

Wired Ethernet is the only thing working here.

Out of curiosity, would fiber have been easier/cheaper than all that shielded Cat5e/6 cable?

Just updated to Ubuntu 9.04 on the laptop. First thing that went wrong was the wireless card. Drivers gone and no connection. Wired ethernet on the other hand, worked flawlessly. No driver issues, no compatibility errors, nothing. It worked likely a keyboard. There's a lot to be said for the maturity of ethernet cables.

There's also a lot to be said for the reliability of cable, or rather, the unreliability of wireless. Yes, it is convienient to give devices wireless connections, but signal quality is a huge issue with location, time and simple randomness all coming into play in ways cable simply does not have trouble with. For me, a typical ping over wireless goes something like this (below numbers are made up from memory)PING 10.100.1.1 (10.100.1.1) 56(84) bytes of data.64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=62 time=4.35 ms64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=62 time=3.67 ms64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=62 time=3.56 ms64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=62 time=4.45 ms64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=62 time=1500 ms64 bytes from 10.100.1.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=62 time=3.02 ms

A wireless connection is a tradeoff of human convenience for machine efficiency. When it comes to web browsing, email and even watching youtube videos, it's more or less worthwhile for most users. However, when you get to things like voip, bittorrent and online games, wireless connections begin to sag under the weight of your demands.

A company I worked for tried cutting the cord and replacing everything with dumb terminal-like laptops, only to discover that the infrastructure couldn't handle so many simultaneous connections. It was a complete failure because the wireless density and capacity just could not support everyone going wireless.

Besides, what they forget to address is this thing called sunk cost. You've purchased that hardware and infrastructure. You're not going to get any $$$ by replacing everything with wireless anyway.

Exactly. At home I've had wireless for a decade. But now with the ubiquity of wireless ADSL modems, there are about 15 hotspots within range and I can't get a stable connection anymore. I can't wire the rental appt I'm in, so I'm using ethernet over electric wires and it works great. Wireless is already dead for people who live in dense urban environment.

Exactly. At home I've had wireless for a decade. But now with the ubiquity of wireless ADSL modems, there are about 15 hotspots within range and I can't get a stable connection anymore.

The last wireless network I installed in an apt showed 4 'Lynksys' networks available plus a few secured & a few more unsecured with actual names. Given what I've seen, I wouldn't be surprised if 20% of apartment dwellers are using the wrong wireless connection.

As dargaud pointed out, saturation is becoming a significant issue in residential areas - most apartment buildings outside of the slums are already having interference issues, a situation which is only getting worse as people continue to push for a wireless life.

But now with the ubiquity of wireless ADSL modems, there are about 15 hotspots within range and I can't get a stable connection anymore.

I recently bought a new Apple Airport Extreme to solve this - by being able to use both 5.0 GHz and 2.4 GHz at the same time. 5.0 GHz is a lot less crowded - for the time being, there's just above 30 wireless networks in the 2.4 GHz range, and just me in the 5.0 GHz. A dual band router allowed me to take advantage of that, while not rendering useless the equipment I've g

Umm, hello? Businesses downsizing their ethernet equipment requirements is a good thing. Means the market's going to get flooded with good, cheap gear that we're all going to buy because we're the kind of people who can be bothered to run cable all over our houses.

I don't agree with that, at least not in the long view. In the short view equipment might become more ubiquitous and inexpensive, but if it became an industry-wide trend then manufacturers would build fewer models and units and the price would most likely go up, not down, in the long run, especially for the home user who only needs to buy one or two ethernet switches and a few cables. Luckily I also don't believe that this is going to be a trend; we can't do everything over WiFi, nor should we try; it would be a debacle.

Exactly. Lucking into a bargain situation has nothing to do with the long term. By your scenario, once prices have risen, I'm already sitting on a small mountain of cheaply-obtained networking gear which will keep me set for life.

Also, your assumption is faulty. Another way to deal with less demand on equipment is to reduce prices. Wired is already cheaper than wifi, so a better way to compete would be to lower prices some more.

You are still going to need ethernet to connect all the wireless access points together.

Exactly. More to the point: for all those desktop machines out there, I see no purpose to flooding the air with wireless signals when the machine is essentially nailed to the desk and not going anywhere. You might just as well enjoy the faster, more secure connection.

Wireless is a great way of conveniently dealing with portable devices like laptops and so forth, but nobody can deny that congestion is going to be a real issue if we do away with ethernet.

A network is tailored to the site and needs of the customer. Where they say 50% to 90% of a client's network ports are unused, does that mean that they've had users migrating from wired to wireless, or did they overpurchase on projected growth?

Using this logic, oh my gosh, even my company must be going wireless. We have a few hundred unused 10baseT connections on our Catalyst 5500. Know why? Because we original projected them to be used for VoIP. When they finally settled on the VoIP provider, they insisted that we use their switches. We simply haven't pulled the extra cards, because we don't have blanks to fill the holes, and we can't find anyone in the office who would prefer to be on an 10Mb/s line, rather than a 100Mb/s line.

WiFi is great and all. I'm on it right now as I write this. But, that doesn't mean it's the end all of networking. When I want true reliable speeds, I go to where there's a network jack, and plug in.

At work, every desk is wired. There are AP's, but people use the wired jacks. Why? Because they appreciate the reliability. There's no random interference. No cell phone, microwave over, or transient event on another floor is going to disturb their connection. I appreciate that they use the wired connections. At any given point, I may have 4 or 5 users on wireless, and a few hundred devices on wired. I can wonder "are those wireless connections legitimate?" If a user has a problem, I'm looking at physical facts (is their cable plugged in. Did they damage the cable) rather than random environmental facts (Is there a thunderstorm? Did someone fire up a new yet not well shielded microwave two floors down?). I had to trace a wireless problem once, and it turned out to be a small portable radio in the corner of someone's office. It was turned off, but it was effectively blocking all RF for about 10 feet. Once I found it, I unplugged it, and the wireless problems there went away.

Right now, I'm sitting at home, away from the office. There are a number of devices that are connected wirelessly. Why? Because I haven't run wires to the places that we may use it. The back porch, where I'm sitting right now, smoking and writing, doesn't have an ethernet drop. The PS3 doesn't have a drop, so it gets it's updates wirelessly. But every machine I depend on for work has an ethernet cable going to a Cisco Catalyst switch. Ask me why a connection goes weird on a wired port, and I can find the problem (it happens rarely, but...) Ask me why my connection drops on the back porch and it's a little harder to find the answer.

We had a problem on the back porch a while back. As it turned out, a neighbor just got DSL, and their AP was on the same channel as ours. Since I was closer to theirs, it interfered with the signal. I spend 20 minutes listening to channels to find the least used spectrum, and changed over. What happens when someone else comes up on that channel? I'll run out of channels eventually. But hey, it's ok, I can set up more AP's with more power, and drown them out. Then it's their problem, right?

Downsides of Wireless:- It is slower than Wired, unless you've somehow got an old 10-Mbit connection through the wall and an 802.11g AP in 30 feet of your location..- It is inevitably more finicky than wired.- It is inevitably more power-consumptive than wired.- It is much more vulnerable to interference - and JUST ABOUT EVERY HOUSEHOLD DEVICE puts out interference. I get a lousier wireless signal (yeah, I have an 802.11g station in my house because I have a laptop and Wii to hook through it) whenever someone turns on the washer or dryer, or the microwave. In both spectra that 802.11 specs use, there are "cordless phones" and cell phones interfering as well. And like parent poster said, if someone else sets up an AP on the same channel you use, even more problems can result.

I ran a 100ft length of Cat6 from my gigabit switch upstairs, through the ductwork and into my living room, for a reason. Between the Xbox360, PS3, and my home DVR box, I'm not about to try to leave things to the unreliability of "wireless."

Wireless while nice isn't the end all be all UNLESS you licence the spectrum from the FCC and have the right to shut down any interferance.

I recently had problems where i live.. in my house i can pick up 11 OTHER wifi networks.. several neighbors just switched over to N routers with that lovely mimo (yaeee lets eat channels because we can)

anyways.. running my normall wrt45g at 5ft channels 4-10 are completely useless due to the amount of interferance from the neighboring networks.

having fun with unsecured wifi.. a good freind of mine lived in college appartments. noticing plenty of unsecured networks in the appartment building he took a small linux box stuck 3 or 4 can't remember exactly wifi cards in it and set it up for his lan in a bridged mode to round robin route his local nat'ed lan.. for any single download it was normal cable modem speeds.. for bit torrent wow was that fast..

But I think the main point has to do with networking fundamentals. Wireless is a virtual shared media. All clients on a node share the same amount of bandwidth. 54Mb can start looking pretty slow with ten busy clients.

Modern switched wired networks segregate traffic between nodes, rather than working as a broadcast type network (wireless/thinnet). So you have a massive performance advantage by using wired networks. A quality 24 port 100Mb switch has an theoretical aggr

That's not entirely the case. In a large operation you'll have to keep that key safe over tens or hundreds of users, many who will have devices they want to connect (illegally or not). How do you know the key hasn't leaked? You are of course right about the brute force attack, but there are other things to consider.

You'd be nuts to use pre-shared keys with more than a few users and devices. Any serious setup with use RADIUS or something, typically tied to the same LDAP backend that handles centralized login authentication and/or to smartcard certificates. That's a gigantic pile of complexity, and (sometimes vendor specific/proprietary) wrinkles and other horrors, which is why ordinary routers mean "WPA-PSK" when they say "WPA"; but it does address the "people writing the key on post-its and handing it out to visitors"

We're not sure about that yet. WPA-AES is designed to be bulletproof, but WPA-TKIP is only a really good band-aid on a really bungled protocol. There have been only minor cracks in WPA-TKIP so far, but it's far from certain that it will stand up forever...

Wireless has it's pros, I have 3 laptops at home so all I use is 802.11n. But I can think of many reasons Ethernet will prevail.

Speed, I have yet to see wireless reliably hit 100mbps in any configuration. Sure some of the standards out there quote that speed but they must be in a clean room with no other radio interference or walls between them or their access point. Let's just forget about 1gbps+ speeds for now with Wireless

Security, even with the best security wireless has to offer, you're just a smidge more vulnerable than with Wired access. It may not be that much, but I've done work with the U.S. Millitary and I never recall seeing a WAP at a sensitive location...

Reliability, less noise on a wired line than a wireless connection, any time someone uses the wrong wireless phone and zap, your connection is zero....try that with a wire. For the love of god don't even think of putting a server on wireless...

> For the love of god don't even think of putting a server on wireless...

Oddly enough, when 802.11g came out, we entertained the thought of adding new servers wirelessly. We were serious for the first... umm... 30 seconds. It would have been neat, and reduced cabling, but where we actually wanted them to work well, it wasn't an acceptable solution.

I have put AP's in a rack before, but it was so I could fire up my laptop, and be assigned an IP. Sitting 6' from the rack,

I'll contest the security thing. Disclaimer: I work for a government agency and we're not allowed any wireless access either, for the same reason, but I'm not sure I agree.

Wireless networks automatically have an extra level of protection over wired networks, their authentication. Wired networks do not require authentication just to receive a connection in the same way. So this is a toss up between physical access and security. A wireless connection may be vulnerable to attack from someone on the floor b

Wireless does not require authentication. It only has authentication if you configure it with WPA/WPA2 and RADIUS. This is called 802.1x or EAP. In fact, you can configure your wired switches with 802.1x and RADIUS and get the same result, no connection without authentication. Just because many places do not use 802.1x on their wired LAN doesn't mean it isn't there.

Also, if the encryption is broken with wireless, I believe you can "listen" to the traffic from the other wireless clients and use that to steal information(I am almost certain this is the case with pre-shared keys, but I am not so sure with WPA/WPA2 RADIUS). With wired, even unencrypted, you can only listen to network traffic that is broadcast or directed to your MAC address. There are attacks where you can convince other computers that you are the router or you can DoS the switch into hub mode, but those attacks can be tricky to pull off and may depend on the network equipment used.

Yes, I'll give them that wifi is a great convenience, especially if you have multiple teenagers living in the house with their assorted laptops. It's perfect for web browsing and browsing the iTunes music store, but anyone who plays a lot of online games, or is simply a power user can tell you, nothing beats a wired connection to the matrix in terms of latency and data throughput. 802.11g (that's 90% of the market right) is still spotty with most consumer grade hardware beyond 20 feet. My netbook may never

Cat 5 is super easy to install. Most people I know who have lived in their homes for more than 5 years (and continue to plan living in them) have already wired their homes for cat5e in at least all of the bedrooms + kitchen, living room and home office. Most of the new homes in my area (Dallas) are usually sold with it installed already. Surround sound wiring at build time is still hard to find in the $350,000 range.

My own anecdote, everytime I'm doing heavy transfer with 802.11, my wireless keyboard and mouse get wonky. Mind you, this is with my HTPC and the keyboard and mouse(pad) is a bit far away, but they both work flawlessly as soon as I throw in good ol' ethernet cable to the HTPC.
So yeah, wired ethernet will be here for a while.

You also need the backhaul capacity, setting up wireless-only repeaters really raises the congestion. I also find that if I want a wireless network device, often the best way to do it is to hook it up to a wired network that has a wireless access point.

I'm guessing the bandwidth of wired connections will always be one step ahead of wireless. Since I regularly have to transfer multi-gigabyte files from network storage, I'll be sticking with whatever makes this process as fast as possible, thanks, even if that does disagree with the prognosis of these moronic "future trend" people.

At home, I have 2 desktop computers. I have a wireless router that came with my ISP, but I shut the wireless functionality down, and connect directly to the ethernet ports.

If I had a laptop, I might want to sit on the couch and compute, but I wonder what the bandwidth difference between wireless and cabled? I've used wireless and it seems zippy, but I've never done any serious downloading with it.

Also, I'm on the fence about whether it's better security wise to close off your wireless router entirely as

If I had a laptop, I might want to sit on the couch and compute, but I wonder what the bandwidth difference between wireless and cabled? I've used wireless and it seems zippy, but I've never done any serious downloading with it.

downloading something to or from from another PC on the lan? massive differences.downloading something to or from the internet? virtually no difference, the internet is the bottleneck.

If I had a laptop, I might want to sit on the couch and compute, but I wonder what the bandwidth difference between wireless and cabled? I've used wireless and it seems zippy, but I've never done any serious downloading with it.

In my experience transferring large files over the network, wired transfers at about 10 MB/sec (100 Mbit connection), vs about 2.5-3 MB/sec using the 802.11g wireless connection. My rule of thumb at home is if I'm doing light browsing on my laptop and want to be mobile, I just wifi it. If I need to do some serious data transferring it's wired all the way.

With default settings from a few providers (who I won't name), if they have a 5 character SSID, it's trivial to find the key. It's just math. Well, more math than I'm willing to do, but there are tools line.

For giggles, I left my laptop on with netstumbler running on the drive home from work the other day. Over 90% of the AP's were encrypted. About 90% of the encrypted had the default 5 character SSID. So, all these "protect

802.11N is awesome. It's faster than 100Mb ethernet even in real world tests. But does it scale well even in dense office buildings? In a cube-farm scenario, where there are computers every five meters in every direction in 3D space, is it really possible to get 100Mb speed?

Security isn't there yet, either. Someone in the parking lot could still put up an access point which advertises itself as being part of your company network, and your users will connect to it. Doing it right is possible in theory (configure computers such that they will only connect to APs which have certificates issued by your company's PKI) but Windows doesn't allow you to lock down wireless in such a way.

And while you can have hundreds of parallel Gbit/sec cables running through the same building, each running at maximum speed, you can not have hundreds of parallel 802.11n-accesspoint each reaching maximum throughput at the same time.

I work for a company that has a fully integrated VoIP infrastructure, providing PoE enabled phones that jump to the desktop. We have no wireless to speak of either with no plans for a widespread implementation. I know you can go wireless with your phones, but do I really want to worry about a bunch of cordless phones?

Think about it, most people tend to build large when building their networks to start. Or "Let's see we have a 4 port router for $x or an 8 port router for $x + $50, why don't we just buy the 8 port router and not have to come back later for another one as my network has only been growing?" I don't think WiFi changed this to any large extend as WiFi really has only liberated the laptops which never used many network jacks in the pre-wifi days to begin with...

I know that a bunch of people are going to say "WTF" and all that, and I have to add my $.02 worth.

What a CROCK of shit. While wireless is great for "casual" surfing and such, I sure wouldn't want it for anything other than that. And from experience, Wireless starts to really drop functionality as the number of users on the WAP goes up. More than about 5 or 10 devices being used on a WAP is just about useless (depending on usage). You might as well be on dialup at that point.

I run into this kind of thinking all the time, and it drives me nuts. We have a guy throwing all sorts of wireless out on our campuses, and it sits mostly unused. And the wireless that IS used is almost useless because so many people are trying to use it at once it is slower old 10base hubs.

Don't get me wrong, wireless has its place. My house is wireless, and I also have wired connections. I just wired my in-laws house (two computer household) because wireless was too slow for them and their needs. They now have gig wire network AND wireless in their house.

Don't get me wrong, wireless has its place, as does wired lans. One has to know the needs, and design and engineer a system that suits the needs of those that are using it.

Not only half duplex, but as you say in your post title (not the text), the resources are shared between all users within a physical area. Aggregate throughput drops quickly as the number of users on a WLAN increases.

If we replaced our copper connections with WLAN at my company, the network would become effectively useless. Too many users.

Another way to think of it is: For a typical user, even a 100Base-T wire to a switch will match even the latest and greatest MIMO high speed implementations (advertised 270-300, but in reality you'll be lucky to see 100 Mbps real world in a single direction).

Once you go above 2-3 users, the switch connections win hands-down.

Add gigabit into the mix (cheap nowadays) and wired wins by an even greater margin.

If you're an apartment dweller such as myself, you can forget about WiFi. The airspace is too crowded on all channels (1-11) which leaves me with dropped packets and a short range. Oh, and I have periods of total disconnect when my neighbor decides to use his/her circa 1980s microwave.

Solution? I just run CAT5 along the floor baseboard from the router to my PC and PS3.

It is like the brand spanking new Harvard MBA starting to work for a railroad discovering, to his utter horror, that all the rolling stock in the railroad adds up to just 1/100 th of the track owned by the company. He smartly addresses the over inventory problem by tearing up and selling for scrap all the excess track!

It is a question of series vs. parallel. Any sort of wireless connection is going to be shared by multiple people using it in a serial fashion. This means that Ann can't send while Fred is sending. Period.

OK, if you have Ethernet cables running to both Ann and Fred then they can, absolutely both send at the same time. With switches linked by fiber and where everyone isn't banging on the same server you often acheive parallel communications all the way through the system.

If you are posting on Slashdot or reading email it may not make a big deal. Moving large files around, interacting with some remote graphic intensive application or just doing "office work" with lots of transactions can make this seems like a really silly idea.

Sure, wired connections are expensive to run and they shouldn't be run except for productivity or security. In my company, both of these are considerations and it would be unthinkable to rely on wireless.

Fun fact: Wired Ethernet (before the wide adoption of switches) used to be a broadcast protocol also.:-) That's what that red "collision" light was for. [rrdatatelecom.com]
(Thankfully, switches are plentiful these days. They weren't during the heyday of 10baseT / 10base2. *shudder*)

The first thing that popped into my head is security. That alone is reason enough. Never mind the bandwidth and interference issues. I think interference issues would also increase with the prevalence of wireless as well.

Limited shared bandwidth. Soon your internet connection will be faster than your WiFi connection.Security - WEP is hopelessly broken. WPA-PSK is not foolproof. Proprietary solutions suck and are expensive.Interference with nearby WLANs. There are only three unshared channels; the rest of the channels overlap. It's going to be very difficult to not overlap someone else's nearby WLAN and when you do, the performance of everyone's (on that frequency) will decreaseReliability - There are often "holes" in RF transmission, even close to the antenna. I found a spot at our conference table where my notebook drops the connection. A few inches either way and the connection is perfect. This is just 25' from the WAP.Driver load order: Are you on a Windows network and do you need to log on to a domain/active directory? If your wifi driver won't load before the workstation stack you may not be able to authenticate properly.Connection tracking - this is related to the limited bandwidth and limited memory in most WAPs.

Once you get more than 15 or so workstations on a WLAN performance can really start to suck, especially if you have network drives that see heavy use, or source control with heavy use. or if you try to do anything with a thin client.

Abandoning ethernet for WiFi is another nail in the second(?)third(?) death of the thin client, because bandwidth limitations and reliability will become a real concern.

On the other hand, I hate thin clients, and I hate Software as a Service (WHY would you trust another company to store all of your data under a restrictive license AND where obtaining your data if the provider goes belly up will be damn near impossible?), so bring on the WLANs!